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Yesterday, I took part in a pub quiz. It was part of the London David Icke Discussion Group:

I can’t quite remember how I found out about the David Icke Discussion Group, but when I heard they were having a meeting at the weekend, I thought I’d go along. In fact, they meet once a month and the group has been going for almost a year. Originally, they met at a different pub, but apparently someone put some anti-New World Order stickers in the toilets and they had to move.

I didn’t really know what to expect and felt a bit self-conscious at the back on my own. However, everyone was very friendly and I was invited to join a group at a nearby table. One of the group had first started getting interested in “all this” after feeling “a presence” in his room one night and believes that Charlie Sheen was “replaced” after he spoke out about 9/11. Another had a young daughter who was a fan of Lady Gaga, despite her father warning her of Gaga’s Illuminati and Satanic symbolism. Like me, the third guy at the table had never been to one of these meetings before, but had read all of David Icke’s books and was keen to know more.

The meeting was supposed to start at 12.30pm, but an hour passed and nothing much had happened. The woman who organised the event seemed busy taking photos of “orbs” in the room, occasionally breaking off to say that the meeting would be starting in ten minutes or so. Say what you like about the New World Order, I bet their meetings start on time.

Eventually, the meeting began. There was a talk from Ben Emlyn-Jones, followed by a pub quiz. Ben is the founder of Hospital Porters Against The New World Order (HPANWO). For twenty years, Ben worked as a hospital porter. For the last few years, he has also run the HPANWO website. But then in October last year, the hospital where he worked received an anonymous complaint about some of the videos Ben had posted to Youtube and he was suspended from his role:

I have reason to believe that Ben Emlyn-Jones, one of your hospital porters is behaving in an unprofessional manner on the internet. I would not like to visit your hospital with this person as a porter in my care, or one of my family. I thought I would bring this to your attention. Thank you.

The complaint claimed that the video was racist, although it is quite obvious that it was intended as satire. Clumsy, clunking satire, but still satire. Obviously, the target is not Muslims or asylum seekers. The video is saying that 9/11 was a government conspiracy and that the resulting hostility towards Muslims is a smokescreen used by the political elite to introduce increasingly draconian security measures, first to be used against the vilified minority and later against the wider public. I don’t agree with Ben on this issue, but I don’t think it’s racist.

Having said that, I do think the video is slightly problematic. Ben works (or worked) at John Radcliffe hospital. His Youtube username is “benthejrporter”. If you work in a hospital, it’s probably not a great idea to post a video of you fiddling around with a syringe and joking about implanting stuff in people, and it’s really not a great idea to do that if your Youtube channel clearly identifies the hospital where you work.

During Ben’s talk, he repeatedly mentioned the timing of the complaint. The “Microchip a Muslim Day” video had been online for over a year, and had been viewed by many of his colleagues and no-one had complained. So why did this anonymous complaint appear last October? The week before the complaint was made, Ben had appeared in several newspapers. He was featured in The Sun, as part of their coverage of the Weird Conference in Swindon:

Hospital porter Ben Emlyn-Jones is so fearful, in 1997 he set up an organisation to expose the evil. It’s called Hospital Porters Against The New World Order (HPANWO) — although not all members are in his line of work — and it has a website where latest theories are debated.

After refusing to reveal his age — he’s part of the Ageless Movement — Ben reveals he has grave doubts over the official account of the New York’s World Trade Center attacks on September 11, 2001, when two hijacked passenger jets smashed into the landmark Twin Towers.

Ben, from Oxford, says: “It was an inside job. I believe this because of the evidence. Look at the way the buildings disintegrated. Hardly anyone reports the fall of the World Trade Center’s third tower but it collapsed on the same day, in exactly the same way, as the Twin Towers. How did that happen when it wasn’t hit by an aircraft and only small fires were identified?

“The US Government was involved and used the devastation as a false-flag attack to gain support for further strikes on enemies of the USA around the world. You’ve got to ask yourself: Could they? Would they? Does the science add up? In each case, the answer is yes. I fear for mankind and the planet. The malevolence of the authorities is frightening.”

Ben also has grave doubts over official accounts of the Twin Tower attacks. He is convinced it was an inside job.

“9/11 seems to be one of those incidents that could be described as a false flag attack,” he said. These are covert ops designed to give the impression they are carried out by someone else. “It looks to me like 9/11 was one of those because the story we have been told does not really make sense.”

Ben, brought up in Lampeter, pointed to the collapse of the often overlooked Building Seven, a World Trade Center tower that collapsed without being hit by a plane. “It’s the third building people never talk about. It sustained moderate damage from flying rubble. But it almost turned to dust, like the others did. And it left behind a surprising amount of rubble considering the size.”

Meanwhile, the other towers did not leave enough. “There was too much dust and not enough rubble,” Ben said. The dad of one, who works at Oxford’s John Radcliffe Hospital, had no idea why. “But one thing it could not have been down to was the impact of an aircraft or fire,” he insisted.

Surely, Ben argued, the timing couldn’t just be a coincidence? Was he being punished for speaking out against the New World Order? Well, no. It isn’t a coincidence. Of course the complaint had something to do with him appearing in the papers. But that doesn’t mean there’s an attempt to silence him, it just means someone read about him, had a look at his Youtube channel, thought it was a bit weird and complained to the hospital.

Ben believed that the complaint had been worded oddly. Normally, letters from the public are long and rambling. This was short and to the point. Who wrote the complaint? Someone from within the NHS who wanted him out? Was he set up? As the complaint was anonymous, there’s not really much point in speculating. We’ll never know. He’s right to be angry that twenty years of service can be outweighed by a single anonymous email, but the fact is that a complaint was received and once received, it has to be dealt with. Coming up with elaborate theories about who might be trying to set him up doesn’t change anything.

His story was frustrating to listen to, because he quite obviously has received shabby treatment. Ben was suspended for “gross misconduct”, which seems extreme given that the charges related to entirely harmless, entirely lawful activity carried out in his own free time. Also, he was suspended barely a week after the complaint had been filed, whereas (Ben claims) typical response time in dealing with complaints is around two months. But it seems Ben’s conspiritorial mindset kept getting in the way and stopping him from building any kind of defence. He ignored his union representative’s advice by refusing to remove any of the videos, as he didn’t want to “play along” with the management’s demands, instead he was convinced someone was out to get him because of the things he talks about.

And so there is no surprise how his disciplinary hearing ended, and the decision his management came to:

You clearly believe that you are the victim of some kind of conspiracy […] But we’re not here to listen to a defence based on your beliefs; we are here to consider these allegations based on agreed facts and nothing else; therefore you have not defended yourself at all against these allegations. So therefore my decision is that you are to be deseconded from the company and dismissed from the Oxford University and Oxford Radcliffe Hospitals NHS Trust.

After telling his story, there was a question and answer session. One man raised his hand to say that Ben shouldn’t trust his union because “they’ll be complicit in it”, that Ben should check his internet connection (“There’s potentially evidence that the Murdoch thing isn’t just hacking phones, they’ve been hacking the internet as well. And it’s not just Murdoch, it’s the whole lot”). Later, the same man suggested that the original complaint wasn’t just the result of Ben appearing in the newspapers, but he’d been “chosen” to be in the paper in the first place so that would then create a reason for the complaint which would then be used to get rid of him. “For god’s sake, you’re not helping” I felt like shouting.

12 Comment on “PUB QUIZ”

The quiz had quite an unusual structure. Once our team had been announced as the winners, there were a further nine questions which we had to answer individually to determine who in our team was the winner of the winners. The nine questions were all about David Icke. I got five out of nine, putting me joint third. The other two people both got seven out of nine, so then there was a tiebreaker, until the eventual winner was decided and was awarded the prize (the Simon Pegg/Nick Frost film Paul on DVD – a film apparently rich in Illuminati symbolism).

This is pretty horrible. It’s evident that Ben has been treated appallingly by the hospital. Even given that his conspiracy obsessions didn’t help, sacking him because of them seems exploitative and perhaps opportunistic. If they were unhappy with his work, they should have had the cojones to say that, rather than basing his dismissal on something so entirely unrelated to his work. One would hope that hospitals of all organisations would have some compassion for mentally ill people; and if not compassion, then at least basic decency.

Ben’s account is here. Reading it, you get the feeling that he sabotaged his own case by refusing to mount any defence relating to the charges against him, instead fixating on the perceived conspiracy. Even from his own account, you can sense the frustration of the management trying to get him to offer a defence:

The chairman listened carefully to me and then replied: “So you don’t want to offer any defence against these allegations?” I answered that this was my defence. He responded: “No, this is not a defence, this is just a reason why you don’t want to make a defence.”

He repeatedly went against the advice of his union rep, and he refused to offer any real defence or explanation. Once the disciplinary procedure had began, the outcome was inevitable. He wasn’t sacked for being a conspiracy theorist, but the thought processes which led him to believe those theories also prevented him from keeping his job.

There’s a conceivable explanation for every wrong ever done to you if you believe in these conspiracy theories. It’s a way of absolving yourself of blame. I think Ben’s lack of defence shows this: he honestly believes he has been wronged by some imaginary force, rather than seeing he’s been wronged by his employers, against whom he actually has a chance of appealing. If you’re so used to shifting the blame, then you don’t realise that sometimes the blame doesn’t need to be shifted.
Also, were the David Icke questions about his career as Coventry City goalkeeper, or in his later work as an author and scourge of the Lizards who walk among us?